Quote:
Originally Posted by LouGehrig
Would a player who hit in his team's LAST 25 games, say on the 1964 Phillies or 1973 Cubs, have been valuable than a player who hit in 25 consecutive games during the middle of the season?
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No. Games played in the miodle of the season count exactly as much as games played in September. There may be a difference in dramatic perception, but there is no substantial difference in terms of impact on the goal of winning your division. If a team wins a game 10-9, all ten of the runs that were scored were equally critical, remove any one of them and the victory evaporates. Thus, the portion of the runs scored in the early innings have no more or less value than the 10th run even if it came on a walk off homerun. Had those earlier runs not been scored, that walk off homerun would have been reduced to a parting shot in a loss. It's all perceptions of staggered values, while actually being equal values. It works the same way for the team's schedule. September wins may seem more critical because you are closer to resolution, but they are not really any more critical.
Mistaking the September games as having greater value than ones played in any other month, is an error most congruent with mistaking Dimaggio's streak for something of value beyond its context within the entire season. That Dimaggio got the hits...that is what counts. How they were arranged, that's random luck at work.
Think of it on a simpler level....if the contest was coin tossing, the winner being whichever side came up most frequently within 162 tosses, what is critical is only which side came up most frequently. If the loser happened to have won an inexplicable 25 tosses in a row during the contest, that means zip if overall if there were not at least 82 such victories. Nor does it mean anything if the winner was ten tosses behind and won the last ten in a row to pull out the victory. That creates the perception of "clutch" while in reality was random.
And that's what is important in understanding the value of Dimaggio's streak....it was randomness at work, not skill. Dimaggio's skill was getting lots of hits, it was never arranging the pattern of those hits. No one has such a skill and even if someone did, it would be a useless one because it has nothing to do with winning ballgames.